The Vulva Pilgrim: A Medieval Badge and Its Rival Readings

Among the small lead-tin badges recovered from riverbanks and silted harbors in the Low Countries is a figure that looks, at a glance, like any other traveler on the road to a shrine. It carries a staff and a string of prayer beads, and on some examples it wears a pilgrim’s hat and wooden sandals. The body under the hat is a vulva. The Kunera database of late medieval badges at Radboud University in Nijmegen describes one example, found in Amsterdam, as a “Vulva figure dressed as pilgrim with pilgrim’s staff and rosary,” and a search of the database returns more than two dozen records of the type.¹ On several the staff ends in a phallus. One from Rotterdam wears a small phallus-shaped badge of its own, a souvenir pinned to a souvenir.¹

These objects are genuine archaeological finds, common enough to form a recognizable type. What they meant to the people who made, sold and wore them is a harder question, and historians do not agree on the answer. What follows sets out what the badges themselves show, where they sit in the much larger world of medieval badges, and the main interpretations, none of which has settled the matter.

Millions of cheap badges

Pilgrim badges were mass-produced souvenirs, usually cast in an inexpensive alloy of tin and lead and fitted with a pin or eyelet so they could be attached to clothing.²³ Willy Piron, introducing the Kunera project in 2002, tied the beginning of cheap badge production to the growth of mass pilgrimage, which he linked closely to the rise of Santiago de Compostela; production fell steeply after the Reformation, so the database stops at 1600.² Kunera now gives access to more than 26,000 badges and ampullae, with images running from Christ, the Virgin and the saints to plants, animals, utensils, literary scenes and “explicitly sexual subjects”.⁴ In a review of Ann Marie Rasmussen’s 2021 book on medieval badges, Albrecht Classen notes that millions of specimens survive, most of them from northwestern and northeastern Europe.⁵⁶

Not every badge was a pilgrim’s token. Piron sorted the material into pilgrim souvenirs, other religious badges and a large group of “profane” ones: heraldic signs, animals, household objects, literary figures and erotica. When he wrote, about 73 percent of the items in the database had a religious meaning, 20 percent a secular one, and for 7 percent the meaning could not be decided. He added that “a clear distinction between the three groups cannot be made.”² Jakub Sawicki, writing in 2022 on secular badges from central European towns, makes a similar point: their subjects range from sexual scenes to heraldry to ordinary objects, and their meaning is often ambiguous.⁷

Much of the surviving material comes from wet ground. Lena Gimbel’s 2012 thesis describes the sexual badges in her study as finds from excavations in the Schelde estuary, along the Seine and along the Thames.⁸ Sawicki observes that badges of all kinds often turn up at water sites such as canals, rivers and islands, and suggests this might relate to offerings made to gain favor. That remains a hypothesis rather than an established practice.⁷

What the vulva pilgrims look like

The Kunera records give a consistent picture. The badges are small and nearly all cast in lead-tin; where the fastening is recorded it is usually a pin, and recorded heights run between about 2 and 5 centimeters.¹ The largest group, eleven of the twenty-six records, is dated to roughly 1375 to 1424, in most cases following the 1993 catalog of the H.J.E. van Beuningen collection by van Beuningen and Jos Koldeweij.¹⁹ Five are placed later, between 1425 and 1474, and two more broadly in the fifteenth century. One from Gemert is dated 1350 to 1399, and one from Ieper (Ypres) in Belgium, which shows a phallus and a vulva both dressed as pilgrims, is dated between 1325 and 1374. Six carry no narrower date than the database’s overall span of 1000 to 1599.¹ These are the dates assigned in the catalogs; none of the badges carries an inscription that would date it.

The find spots cluster in the Netherlands, at Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Delft, ‘s-Hertogenbosch and several sites in Zeeland such as Reimerswaal, Nieuwlande and Arnemuiden. Others come from Belgium and from Paris; two of the Paris finds are now in the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, and an example without a recorded find spot is in the British Museum.¹ Many of the best-known pieces belong to the Van Beuningen family collection, published in the Rotterdam Papers series, which has been central to the study of these objects.¹⁹

Within the type the details vary. A badge from Reimerswaal shows the figure in wooden sandals and a pilgrim’s hat, holding a phallus-topped staff in one hand and a rosary in the other. One from Poortvliet adds a phallus on each shoulder. One from Gemert wears phallus badges on both sides of its hat, and a Paris example stands on stilts.¹ The vulva pilgrim belongs to a wider family of badges in which genitals behave like people. Jasmin Mollet, writing for the Swiss National Museum, describes a vulva on horseback aiming a bow and arrow at itself, a winged and crowned phallus with a bell around its neck, and three phalluses carrying a crowned vulva on a litter in procession, a piece dated 1375 to 1424 and linked to Bruges.³

Words that shape the reading

Calling these objects obscene, erotic or pornographic already takes a position. The art historian Martha Easton has pointed out that the same visual material “might be deemed suggestive, titillating, erotic, pornographic, or obscene,” and that “There is really no word that is completely neutral to describe this imagery”.¹⁰ Gimbel likewise noted that the few earlier scholars who studied these badges had called them erotic, obscene, rude, naughty and pornographic.⁸ The labels matter because they steer the explanation. A badge seen as pornography invites a story about private arousal; a badge seen as an amulet invites a story about fear and protection.

Much of the groundwork was laid by Dutch scholarship built around the van Beuningen collection. Easton directs readers to Koldeweij’s studies of mass-produced badges of a sexual nature and to Malcolm Jones’s essay on secular badges in the 1993 van Beuningen catalog.¹⁰ Koldeweij’s 2005 essay in a Brill volume on late medieval pilgrimage carries the title “‘Shameless and Naked Images’: Obscene Badges as Parodies of Popular Devotion.”¹¹ Jones went on to write a broader study, The Secret Middle Ages (2002).¹² Rasmussen has since published a book on medieval badges and their wearers and a chapter titled “Moving beyond Sexuality in Medieval Sexual Badges.”⁶¹³

Four readings, none settled

A parody of pilgrimage. The most direct reading takes the costume at face value. Pilgrims were recognized by their gear: staffs, hats with badges sewn on, travel bags and flasks.⁷ A vulva dressed in exactly that gear, sometimes wearing a badge itself, imitates both the pilgrim and the pilgrim’s souvenir. Mollet summarizes the view that the genital badges satirize Christian practices such as processions and pilgrimage and that “They should be seen as objects of discussion and humour and not taken too seriously.”³ The figure may also have been a joke about women who travel. Danijela Sarić cites a 2006 essay by Jennifer Naumann whose title links “The Animate Vulva, Social Satire, and Fear of a Female Pilgrim.”¹⁴ Literature of the period shows that such a joke was available. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath has been to Jerusalem three times and to Rome, Boulogne, Santiago and Cologne; “She coude muche of wandring by the weye,” wears a hat “As brood as is a bokeler or a targe,” and knows “the olde daunce” of love.¹⁵ No source ties the badge to Chaucer’s character, and the comparison shows only that the itinerant woman pilgrim was already a figure of comedy and suspicion.

Protection. A second reading treats the badges as amulets. Piron points to two fourteenth-century dog badges found in Paris with the motto “bien aia qui me porte” (“Well being to him who wears me”) and argues that badges were expected to avert evil and bring luck, adding that “the erotic badges had a similar apotropaic element.”² Mollet summarizes Ruth Mellinkoff’s argument that pilgrims wore genital badges alongside religious ones as extra protection against demons, an argument supported by finds of both kinds at the same sites; Mollet herself doubts that such mild images would have frightened a demon.³ Easton places the badges beside transgressive images in manuscript margins and church carving, which may have been included “perhaps in order to render it powerless, perhaps to harness its power as protective, much like the numerous badges that have been found with disembodied, sometimes winged, male and female genitalia.”¹⁰ Gimbel’s thesis takes the idea furthest, arguing that the badges guarded their owners against the evil eye, which during the worst outbreaks of plague was believed capable of transmitting the disease.⁸ That plague-specific version rests on a single thesis and has not become a consensus.

A moral mirror. Sebastiaan Ostkamp, writing in 2009 about secular badges found in the Netherlands, accepts an amulet function but also reads them through the late medieval theme of the world turned upside down. On his account, such images contrasted the holy with the profane to show the cost of sin and to recommend chastity: “That the images are almost blasphemous indicates the absolute sway of religion in the medieval world, where even striking secular images served a religious function.”¹⁶ He notes that the finds come from urban and rural homes, monasteries and castles, so the phenomenon was not only urban.¹⁶

Carnival and conversation. Mollet also connects the badges with carnival and with the inverted world of manuscript margins, where monkeys play music and hares hunt people. She notes that the winged, crowned phallus appears both as a badge and as a drawing in a 1392 manuscript of the Decretals of Gregory IX in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.³ Sawicki reports that ship badges crewed by personified phalluses are likewise read as upside-down-world motifs.⁷ Surviving pins show that the badges were made to be worn on clothing, but they do not tell us how often, by whom or on what occasions.³

Living with uncertainty

The readings are not mutually exclusive. A badge could mock pilgrims, raise a laugh among friends and still be thought lucky to wear. Piron’s 2002 judgment still stands: “The functioning of profane insignia in the Middle Ages remains highly unclear”.² Sarić, examining individual badges two decades later, concludes that many of these small objects are “near impossible to interpret.”¹⁴

What we lack is any medieval text that names the vulva pilgrim or explains why someone bought one. We do not know who cast them, what they cost, whether men or women wore them, or whether they were worn on the road to a shrine at all. Find spots tell us where a badge was lost, not who owned it. What texts do show is how thoroughly the ordinary pilgrim badge was part of the scene being mocked. In an early English translation of Erasmus’s dialogue on pilgrimage, Menedemus greets his returning neighbor Ogygius, back from Santiago and Walsingham, and remarks that he seems “clothyd with cokle schelles” and hung all over with “bruches of lead and tynne.”¹⁷ The vulva pilgrim took that familiar figure, the traveler covered in tokens of devotion, and gave it a body that no one could mistake. Whether its wearers meant it as satire, charm or simply a good joke, the badge depended on everyone knowing what a real pilgrim looked like.

Footnotes

1. Kunera database, records 00663, 00664, 00665, 00666, 01902, 06541, 06930, 14025, 18409, 23476 and related records. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

2. Piron 2002, pp. 376-378. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Mollet, Swiss National Museum Blog, May 23, 2024. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

4. Kunera, “About Kunera.” ↩

5. Classen, Mediaevistik 35 (2022), abstract. ↩

6. Rasmussen 2021 (Crossref record). ↩ ↩²

7. Sawicki 2022, MEMO 9, sections on secular badges and temporary communities. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

8. Gimbel 2012, abstract (as reproduced by Medievalists.net). ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. van Beuningen and Koldeweij 1993 (Open Library record). ↩ ↩²

10. Easton 2008, pp. 1 and 15, with n. 45. ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. Koldeweij 2005 (Crossref record). ↩

12. Jones 2002 (Open Library record). ↩

13. Rasmussen 2013 (Scholars@Duke record). ↩

14. Sarić 2023, pp. 9 n. 7, 14 n. 24, and 18. ↩ ↩²

15. Chaucer, General Prologue, ed. Skeat, lines 463-476. ↩

16. Ostkamp 2009, abstract (as reproduced by Medievalists.net). ↩ ↩²

17. Erasmus, ye pylgremage of pure deuotyon, opening exchange (Project Gutenberg #14746). ↩